Ready to move on from your Love/Hate relationship (with spreadsheets)?

Ready to move on from your Love/Hate relationship (with spreadsheets)?

Date: 14/12/2016

By Piers Wilson

It's a familiar scenario: the boss needs a report and they need it yesterday. There are decision to be made. You get to work and it looks like it's going to be a long day.

Why? Well a lot has to do with our love/hate relationship with spreadsheets. They are familiar and flexible. They're what we've always done and learning something new can be daunting.

And yet spreadsheets eat up so much of our planning, budgeting and forecasting time ... and for what? Mostly delayed outcomes which may nto be as accurate as we might hope. Maybe it's because of errors in the data or maybe we made the all-too-easy mistake of not using the most recent version of the spreadsheet.

The 80/20 split

In this spreadsheet-dominated world, analysts are often spending up to 40-80% of their time preparing, cleaning and transforming data and sometimes as little as 20% analysing it and adding value.

We are highly reliant on IT to get the data to us in the first place, which leaves us lagging. Collaborating with our co-workers can mean sending endless streams of emails and creating confusion over versions.

It might be what we've always done but, let's be honest, we all have that sinking feeling that it's not the best use of anyone's time and skills, and the slow slog is probably not going to help you stand out (for the right reasons).

At the big picture level, this latency and the threat of inaccuracy in budgeting and forecasting leaves your organisation vulnerable to falling behind.

But what if you could change all of this?

Cornerstone thinks spreadsheets were a great tool for organisations in the past: before our data exploded, our markets became highly competitive, and our performance management needs more advanced.

We've developed PM2Plan, a performance management solution built on TM1 and designed to transform your planning, budgeting, and forecasting cycles. By incorporating best practices learned from 100's of performance management solution implementations across many industry sectors, we've learnt there are ways we can all work smarter ...

That is - keep management happy and get home at a decent hour!

Deployable in just weeks, the modular analytics solution can achieve ROI rapidly. Interested to see how PM2Plan can help you save time and costs in other areas of your business? Why not reinvest some of that ROI into one of the other easily-implemented modules that are offered within the solution.

Control without complexity

PM2Plan and TM1 gives you power over your data - accessing it, adding it, changing it, while automation means fewer issues and manual effort spent integrating and updating data. Excel remains one of the interfaces which can be used to provide input into the platform and you'll receive any additional training you need as part of the package provided by Cornerstone.

Experience the reassurance of knowing your team and organisation is working from one single, central version of the truth, from assumptions and calculations applied in a consistent way across the company and more data accuracy; previously long hours of work, no longer going to waste.

Monthly budget reports attained in 80% less time, and tri-annual forecasts in half the time, are just some of the results achieved by those who have implemented PM2Plan to date. Faster, simpler, more accurate, and accessible on any device.

Click here to learn more about how PM2Plan can increase your efficiency.